Note: This story is more than 3 years old.

Despite end to combat ban, women still face hurdles in military

U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, an Air Force veteran,
remembers when her branch of the military considered letting women
serve as combat pilots back in the 1990s.

“We … had a chief of staff of the Air Force testifying before
Congress against women flying in combat aircraft, and he would be asked
things like, ‘So you would rather pick a less-qualified man over a
more-qualified woman to go fly these aircraft?’” McSally recalled.

“And he would say things like – and I’m paraphrasing – ‘Yes I would,
and I know that’s hard to justify but it’s just the way that I feel,’”
said McSally, who went on to become the first female fighter pilot in
the U.S. to fly in combat and the first to command a fighter squadron.

It would take another 20 years before the rest of the military agreed to lift the “general exclusion”
bans on women in combat roles. McSally’s comments, recorded last week,
were played Monday at a Washington, D.C., forum on the progress the military has made
toward fully integrating women into military combat positions.

Two years after the Pentagon announced plans to lift
the Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule, speakers at
the forum said there is still work to be done and attitudes to change.

Monday’s event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace included three panelists who were part of a Special
Forces program that bent the combat exclusion rule before it was broken.
The program recruited qualified female military personnel to aid
squadrons in “Cultural Support Teams,” where they would interact with
female civilians during combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Shortly after I came back, I started hearing the whole thing about
the general exclusion and I was like combat exclusion? I’ve been doing
this for a while now,” said Sgt. 1st Class Meghan Malloy, one of the
women in the CST program, with a laugh.

The biggest hurdle for integrating women into combat roles, said many
of the panelists, is finding gender-neutral standards for combat
positions. Those standards, they said, should not affect military
readiness, but should directly apply to the job that the standards test
for.

“We’re not lowering our standards nor are we compromising our
military doctrine,” said Maj. Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, one of the
first speakers. “The key is to have the right standard for the right
occupation.”

Another issue often brought up by speakers was what the cohesion of
male and female combat infantry units would look like after integration.
Panelists debated whether this could be a real issue or only a way of
protecting the “band of brothers” tradition.

“It’s about preservation, about maintenance of the existing order and
that, to me, is an assumption that the existing organization is perfect
and whatever we do to change it can only have negative or no impact if
it’s done really, really well,” said Robert Egnell, a visiting professor
at Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

“That, to me, is the wrong starting point when it comes to the
inclusion of women in combat,” Egnell said. “I think it’s horrible to
join an organization and feel that the only way I can impact it is
negatively or not at all.”

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